Jessica didn’t like it.

This feeling of helplessness and will-breaking futility.

The last time she had felt this way, she was eleven-years-old and she had thrown a temper tantrum because daddy had said she couldn’t go to a friend’s birthday party. Jessica had run stumbling out of her house without her abhorred white cane. In the flurry of her emotions, eleven-year-old Jessica had taken no measures to orient herself before running headlong into the blind darkness she had then hated.

It prevented her from doing so much! She had lost out on school trips and activities, excursions to the mall with the other girls, the ability to make new friends, and even her beloved ballet lessons. The hate she had for the world had never been stronger than in that first year after her 'incident'. But what had cut the deepest was the self-loathing Jessica had for her now stupid useless eyes. Eyes that she had grown accustomed to hearing were ‘gorgeous’ and ‘beautiful’ since she was a little child.

She had gotten lost in the forest behind her house that day. The forest was not that expansive, but Jessica had never felt that insecure and helpless since the ‘incident. After running headlong towards god knows where, she had folded herself into a fetal position in the middle of the cold decaying-leaf-covered forest floor, defeated and stewing in self-hate for her own worthlessness.

The girl had made not one noise as she lay there. In those two hours she was there, Jessica had completely given up.

On everything.

And that was how her father found her.

Curled into a tight cashew, knees drawn deep into her chest, pressing against cold blue lips, clothes damp and streaked with mud and dirt, alabaster skin scratched and marred with already settling bruises, eyes…eyes shut off to the world, never wanting to open ever again.

Jessica had never heard her daddy cry that hard. Never since that day has Jessica